Reading Internet studies today.

I am reading

Whitty, Monica T., Joinson, Adam N. Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2009).

This is interesting and I agree with these authors that not all self disclosure is anonymous. I am seeing this working into my findings that sites that allow social networking with those we know offline are different than the "virtual friends who are strangers" topics of past Internet studies.

HTML authoring resources by Ian Graham University of Toronto

I think Ian Graham wrote some great HTML books in the 1990's. Is anyone studying the computer self help press?

here are some titles that are only pennies used from Amazon

If a few bucks is still too much you read his online tutorial

http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/NewHTML/intro.html

Old but still useful

The Html Sourcebook: A Complete Guide to Html 3.0 (Paperback)
by Ian S. Graham (Author), Ian S Graham (Author)


Html 4.0 Sourcebook (Paperback)
by Ian S. Graham (Author) "What is a text markup language?..." (more)



I am trying to start reading this one

HTML Stylesheet Sourcebook (Sourcebooks) (Paperback)
by Ian S. Graham (Author)



BTW I do not know Ian or have any monetary connection to him nor really academic beyond learning from his great books and always available online tutorial.

Components of Operational Knowledge: ProQuest journal database search feeds.

Here are the RSS feeds from ProQuest for the searches I did to complete the searching for the seven sub-component types of knowledge theorized to make up operational knowledge.

Procedural and Process Knowledge

http://rss.proquest.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/rss?rss_id=504831

Heuristic Knowledge

http://rss.proquest.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/rss?rss_id=504839

Cultural Knowledge

http://rss.proquest.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/rss?rss_id=504858

Completing a literature search within the thesis

Last winter and spring I had searched out types of knowledge theorized to make up operational knowledge at a firm. At present in RefWorks I have four folders for four types of knowledge. These are:

• Cognitive Knowledge
• Skills Knowledge
• Systems Knowledge
• Social Network Knowledge

Today I want to search for the remaining three forms of knowledge in this theoretical framework. These are:

• Process and Procedural Knowledge
• Heuristic Knowledge
• Cultural Knowledge

.

This theoretical framework follows from:

Hamilton Beazley, Jeremiah Boenisch, and David Harden. Continuity Management: Pre-serving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).

I have been studying this book for over a year now.

Catching up on Internet studies: Thoughts on the present theory direction of the social impact of the Internet

I am reading

Katz, James E. and Rice, Ronald E. Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Interaction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002).

I have read now the introductory chapter critically and find a comment. In terms of community involvement I would add that, in fact, if we open the Internet up to include computers used offline and call it simply ICT's we could add organizational power of ICT's in building the processes of volunteering and the work needed to volunteer as a plus to Internet access. Rather than just recruitment of volunteers ( mentioned in the first chapter) the Internet does much more for a volunteer group. I spend hours volunteering every week. It is not the Internet alone amongst ICT's that allow me to be a better volunteer and for our group to do its business. I am now thinking of multiple group membership and multiple group participation. Almost all these groups must do writing. The other basic skill reading it not as fully aided by ICT's in the context of reading in volunteer work. Whereas, writing benefits from the Internet, Palm pilots, web pages, pdf's, word processors, spreadsheets, calendaring software. I guess what I am finding is the social capital thesis is less important than the work organization thesis.

Researching my next workplace.

My supervisor helped me find another possible place to work supporting research. I started to print some 27 analytical articles from the web that this workplace has written. The articles appear to be sets of three or four per year with the same titles each year except for the year in the title. So these are like annual reviews of their subject matters. The job would be for one year supporting these publications as a technical/IT research assistant. I have been worried about being disorganized with my workplace reading, so these systematic articles are inspiring me to neatly catalog the articles in a binder. I am not sure I will have the time to read them all before my interview but I really need to do that. My first question for my new employers will be to ask them to describe the processes that happen from beginning to end for the data and most importantly the quality control process they use in their processes.

Workplace organization and its modeling.

There is an interesting section on conceptualizing workplace organization in this book James R. Taylor, et al. The Computerization of Work (Thousand Oaks, Calf.: Sage, 2001) at 9.

Paper for the May gradudate conference in social economy is coming along.

I started to scan with my eyes divergences from the perfect population pyramid. I have some doubts now about my interpretation and criteria for booms, after finding, in fact, the world population has some age bands starting in 2000 where the older band exceeds the younger band in size. This is my first clue of a boom or divergence from the perfect pyramid. This rule is, if an older age band exceeds a younger age band, we have identified a boom. I have scanned the available world pyramids for both genders combined but not separately and copied and pasted the full years data for all occurrences of the divergent pattern. I then tried to construct a population pyramid with Excel. I needed to code one gender's population with negative numbers to get the Excel chart to look something like a population pyramid. I also scanned with my eyes Afghanistan and next is Albania.

So my method is to scan with my eyes. The other choice of method is to read the tables into R and run a check to see if a table decreases continuously from the 0-4 age band to the 80+ age band. Actually the 80+ age band is giving me some false positives in the rule above. I will do all the countries by eye and then run the R code to check. Or better would be to next design the R code to find all the divergences and not have to scan all the rows of countries. I have so far scanned only the World and Afghanistan and reached about the thousandth row of thirty three thousand rows of data. So here automating will save me some time.

Also getting the data from each table into R gives me more statistical power than simply identifying one divergent pattern. I can run many pattern recognitions once the data is cleanly into R or other statistical software.

Here is my abstract for this paper.

Abstract
The world over all has no baby boom. There are always more babies and fewer seniors when one looks at the whole world. We would like to examine if baby booms exist in any and each country. If this examination is possible we will then move further. The study will survey the age pyramid structures, the typical retirement age and industries, that the majority of the population work within, for all the world's nations, if data can be located. If these measures are possible attempts are made at assessing the potential knowledge losses in these majority industries as the widest parts of the age pyramid retire and take their workplace operational knowledge with them potentially crippling these industries and nations. General comments are attempted concerning each nation studied.

I submitted a paper to a conference this May in Ottawa.

I submitted a paper proposal to the International Student Conference on the Social Economy Innovation & Sustainability in a Changing World: Exploring Social Economy Alternatives.

I explored some demographics from the US census international data web site looking for baby boom's world wide.

I found global population numbers by age and by gender for all the world's countries at the US census international data site. I downloaded tables for every country for each year from 1996 through projections to 2010 and then by five and then ten year projections up to 2050. So why did I need this data? I was looking to find the baby boom in each country. I am going to write a paper that looks at the baby boom in each country, then looks at the major industries in those countries and then looks for possible knowledge lose crisis points in time in the future for each country. This would be the point when the widest part of the population pyramid retires.

Of course retirement I am realising is not a global concept. So this may be a flawed study.

I started to examine the data from the world population pyramid and found the world has no baby boom. The world has more babies and fewer seniors with no exceptions. For every year and every projection and at each age band there more younger persons than older persons. I guess we could call this the perfect pyramid. Now I have to inspect each of some 200 countries individually. I think now I will submit my abstract for this research project to a conference I have created it for. The deadline is fast approaching. I will rewrite it one more time and send it off.

Enjoying work and being rewarded by practicing statistics, maths and programming.

I have won a promotion at work but have to find an opening at the higher level. That is I am qualified for a promotion now but have yet to find an opening. I transferred recently from being a research assistant in aging research to being a research assistant in Internet research. In the first research assistant job, I was able to effect some control on my work and time at work by advertising my SAS skills. These skills have devloped over that year of work have improved and made it possible for both my latest transfer and also my passing the tests and interviews for the promotion. This is at least how the promotion job is styled as a technical statistical officer. But the real power I was able to affect was choosing where in my large workplace to work. I was able to match my own reading and research interests in the Internet to my workplace. At the same time I am now writing SAS everyday. I now must carefully choose a new field of statistics to work in that I will enjoy. This is one present task and my coworkers have offered me help in this. I am living in some sweet times and have a very good work life at the moment that is healthy and in somewhat of a sync with my school studies.

My next step is to search google scholar and google for similar projects.

I have searched Ph.D. and other thesis libraries when doing my paper last summer for knowledge measurement by searching for knowledge management and demographics. But this may have been an error. So now I need to search for this term: "simulation of knowledge management in learning organizations.". I did this once this morning with google scholar and found a paper from McMaster's school of business. This covered something called a Tango simulation but this turns out to a live person simulation not a computer simulation.

I have emailed professor Tuncer Ören for some guidance in simulations and knowledge management

I have emailed a simulations expert professor Tuncer Ören at the university of Ottawa for some advice with modeling firms. I have sent him my present thesis abstract and a brief paragraph explaining why I chose this topic.

I need to prepare a summary of my thesis for a professor who may be able to help me.

I have asked my instructor from my last term for help locating researchers who have simulated firms. I have found no one so far who knows knowledge management at the university of Ottawa. But my instructor has found someone who would like to see a summary of my research plan. So I will send my abstract from my thesis draft and the abstract from my summer paper.

I am beginning my thesis proposal tonight.

I am beginning to write my thesis proposal after emailing someone in simulations for some advise on the structure.

I need to organise my simulation now.

I have the skills and tools now from my last course to start to organize my simulation of the workplace and the retirement of the baby boom. I will start this week and weekend to write the key features document of the simulation and this could be the document for my thesis proposal. I need to freeze frame on this one step and work on this for about a month.

I am working hard at work applying school knowledge.

I am working hard at work today combining my recent computer skills with my school knowledge to produce work that I can not detail here. I can not talk about work as our data at work is confidential so it is good practice to remain fairly tight lipped really about everything. I work with confidential data governed by the Statistics Act and could go to jail and be fined if I caused data to revealed. But I am working with data and learning to a good job and at the same time trying to get ahead in this world of research and analysis.

Thesis proposal course

I have the forms now for my thesis proposal registration. I just need to fill these in and then fax them to the academic adviser and administrator at our school. I also have some guide line documents for completing the thesis proposal.

Tree tabs and mixed tabs add ons for firefox.

This video from a Linden Labs staffer explains these useful firefox add ons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFz66w8wAEY

or search tree style tabs and mixed tabs on goggle. You need the mixed tabs for the tree tabs to work.

Backing up and file and folder making.

I made some folder for years, months, and quarters. I made some templates for folder arrangements. So I have years from the early 1950's through to 2008, I also have a folder full of the months and folders for quarters for different fiscal years. I can then copy and paste these templates into what ever I am organizing.

I also have made some html txt files for this blog and my computer logbook blog for the year 2003 when these blogs were started. I hope to find all my study notes and other files that I made and store them in folders for each year and then back these up to DVD.

I have made some burn folders for the documents folder, the desktop and other files folder and the email folder for the Macbook. This is three 4.7 GB DVD's and I will make six copies for each DVD. I need 18 blank DVD's for this. So my back up process for 2008 has started.